I spent the last weekend in Orlando. It was a wonderfully weekend and the last of its kind for a while.

It got me thinking though about the concept of home. I spent most of my childhood in Orlando, but I remember the almost immediate feeling that it was no longer home as soon as I came back from college one weekend that fall. Something had changed or maybe I had changed, but it didn’t possess the homey comfort it used to. Instead, the homey comfort had been replaced by nostalgia and suspicion that the location of home had changed.

Now, almost six years later home is Tallahassee. Taylor and I made our life there and it has all of the homey comforts we enjoy. Soon, Tallahassee will be replaced with the same glorious nostalgia. It will be of a time gone by – I’ll remember fondly so many memories and places and people, but it won’t be home. We’ll build a new home and eventually it too will possess the homey comforts we associate with home because home is not a place as much as it is a feeling and people.

Each time we move, we break apart a bit. We leave a piece of who we where behind. Pieces of my heart will always be in Orlando (with our family, with my childhood and high school self, with the smoke stacks of suburbia) and in Tallahassee (with our friends, with my college and young married self, with the brick buildings and the smell of Diffenbaugh Hall) and now onward to the next stage to find a new self to leave behind and a new place to make feel like home.